People may be too embarrassed to openly talk about it, but everyone does it, toilet or not. World Toilet Day helps people celebrate the importance of sanitation and raise awareness for the 2.5 billion people who don't have access to toilets and proper sanitation. This video by the nonprofit WaterAid highlights the luxury of having a toilet.

Celebrating your can may seem silly, but not having one can not only lead to embarrassment, lack of dignity and safety issues, but also preventable diseases and even death. When people don't have toilets, they're forced to relieve themselves in open streets, fields, or back alleys. The result? The contamination of drinking water and food sources, which leads to a slew of health risks. Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection and kills 1.8 million people, mostly children, a year. Even countries with abundant toilets have to deal with problems ranging from unhygienic public toilets to waterway-destroying sewage disposal.

Vanilla, blogging on Let's Look At It This Way from Singapore, says that people should care about toilets:

“I know this is a crappy topic to most people. It is unfortunate that it is a ‘taboo' topic to talk about openly and many people remain ignorant about the scale of the problem. I fail to understand how this can be an unimportant topic when, on an average, we visit the toilet 2500 times a year, or 6-8 times a day. In our life time, we would have spent 3 years in the toilet.”

Organized by the nonprofit The World Toilet Organization, World Toilet Day is being celebrated globally with various events. To further increase awareness, WaterAid announced the launch of its new ToiletFinder UK App for iPhone users this week. The free app helps Brits find the nearest public toilet while reminding them how lucky they are to have clean and safe toilets. The largest event today, called The Big Squat, asks people to stop and squat for one minute in a public place to raise awareness. These photos show people squatting globally, including this one of preschoolers in Singapore:

A blog from Brunei, the world according to panyaluru …, also shows appreciation for the toilet by putting it into perspective:

“Imagine if we are walking along in the row of shops in Kiulap or Gadong. Suddenly the tummy grumbles, just like the worst ribut you can think off. No rest bite. Grumble and grumble. Rumblings. The light is on amber and ready to turn green. But no toilets in sight. Not a single public toilet in the rows of shops…Add to that no water, no tissue, nothing! That could be the worst day of your life, your worst nightmare, ever worse than the nightmares those kids have in the Nightmare on Elm Street Movies. On this day, let’s show our appreciation to our toilets.”

Despite its serious side, many people have used humor to celebrate World Toilet Day. In the U.K., the blog London City Drains features a 10-question toilet quiz, while in this video high school teacher Matt Cheplic sings about the day.

Some bloggers point out that toilets alone may not be the answer. Sandhya, blogging on Maradhi Manni in India, says many men don't use available toilets:

“In a city like Chennai, where the climate is hot nearly 10 months of the year, I see men urinating on the roadside all the time. When women can control and go home and relieve themselves, why can't men do so, I don't know. So, first of all people should be fined heavily for doing this crime (yes, it is crime) on the spot. I have seen them doing this on the wall of the public toilets! In Srirangam, I saw them urinating on the compound wall of the temple even though every street surrounding the temple had toilets, which were clean, but pay toilets!”

While lack of sanitation impacts everyone, the taboo around toilets can disproportionately affect women. In some countries, modesty forces women do their business in fields before sunrise or to hold it until after the sun sets, leading to health and safety concerns. Joanne Sprague, blogging on Overturning Boulders in India, observes that women are absent from the morning toilet run in Chennai, while in Ethiopia the blog AN ADVENTURE IN ADDIS notices a similar situation:

“I’ve heard so often about the lack of toilet facilities for women or lack of toilets in general; that teenage girls in the countryside get up at 4 am to go out in the dark to do their business so they don’t get bullied by the boys at school or stop going to school altogether. Men just pee anywhere, cigarette in hand and there’s an assumption that women don’t need to, if they are thought about at all….I want to see a huge billboard in Amharic saying ‘Girls go too’ with a picture of Barbie sitting on a toilet.”

To celebrate World Toilet Day, blogger Jonathan Stray, takes readers on an international tour of toilets he's visited, from Thailand and the U.K. to West Africa and Oman, concluding:

“We in the west with our flush toilets and toilet paper and sparkling shower stalls are the exception; the rest of the world thinks a bathroom is a wet, smelly place, when they have a bathroom at all. A good toilet means you probably have a very good quality of life, so enjoy yours. Happy World Toilet Day!”

Photo of Tiled Toilet by nedrichards on Flickr, Creative Commons.

When the legendary TED conference came down to India, Indian bloggers were understandably excited.

In the run up to TEDIndia, a few Indian bloggers got together to interview TEDIndia fellows and Geetha Krishnan put together a compilation of the TEDIndia fellow interviews.

During the conference, the TED blog fed the excitement by posting session-wise roundups (session 1, session 2, session 3, session 4, session 5, session 6, session 7, session 8, session 9) and reactions to the most popular talks (Hans Rosling, Devdutt Pattanaik, Tony Hsieh, Scott Cook, Pranav Mistry, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, Shukla Bose, Anil Gupta, Kavita Ramdas, Sunitha Krishnan, Sidi Goma, Ramachandra Budihal, Ananda Shankar Jayant, Kiran Sethi, Eve Ensler, His Holiness the Karmapa, Shashi Tharoor) and even did a roundup of reactions to the conference.

TED India participants at the venue. Image by Kiruba Shankar

Several bloggers wrote posts about how TED touched them in unexpected ways.

Rajiv Dingra was one of them –

In my last 3 years and more of blogging experience Ive attended over 50 events (atleast) and each of them have left me richer in knowledge or in insight. But none of them have ever moved me to tears or made me go in deep thought or made me proud to be Indian all in the matter of days. TEDIndia infact was more a reflection of what are the grave issues in India and the brilliance and the fallacy of India rather than being specific to Technology, Entertainment and Design.

Peter Elst summarized TEDIndia in ten quotes.

While the overall reaction to TEDIndia was overwhelmingly positive, several attendees were left a little underwhelmed.

TEDIndia fellow Amit Varma complained that TEDIndia catered to Western stereotypes of India –

There was much exotica, and much mysticism served up that says nothing at all about the country we are today. The average foreign attendee would have gone away with his stereotypes about India reinforced, not shattered. That’s an opportunity missed.

Awesome backdrop for a dance party. Image by Kiruba Shankar

Amit also shared an interesting sociological observation –

The pharmacy at the Infosys campus in Mysore does not sell condoms. I want you to think about that for a moment. This is a campus where thousands of young men and women stay and work together. The official Infosys position on this matter, thus, seems to be that either a) Infosys employees do not have sex or b) Infosys employees have sex, but it should not be safe sex. Isn’t this interesting?

Aditi Machado was surprised by TEDIndia's strong focus on India –

In retrospect the India-focus at TED was too strong. When TED is held in the UK or the US, does the conference become all about those countries and those countries’ contributions to the world? I don’t think so. The running theme at TEDIndia, beginning with the first talk by Hans Rosling, seemed to be: ‘India will become the next superpower. Oh, and China too. But we’re in India and India is a democracy and we hate Commies, so we like India better.’ I’m sure many Indians were flattered, and I’m as patriotic as the next person, but it was disturbing to see that almost every speaker, especially the non-Indians, felt obligated to give us a big pat on the back.

Manjeet Kripalani at Financial Express also complained about TEDIndia's uni-directional programming –

The title was promising: “TEDIndia: the Future Beckons”. On the Mysore campus, India’s future had already arrived. It did not reflect in the programming of TEDIndia. The idea of TED is unique. Brilliant new minds who expound their futuristic ideas in 18 minutes to a sophisticated celebrity audience, interspersed with entertainment, music and some socially responsible talk. This TED conference was more “Bono Saves the World” than either Technology or Entertainment or Design. No soft or hard power, but powerlessness.

TED India talks. Image by Kiruba Shankar

TED attendee Our Woman in Havana rounded off her series of posts about TEDIndia (day one, day two, day three, day four) by deciding that the real genius of TED lies in its ability to gather together people who are hugely talented and successful in a diverse range of fields –

Some of my best TED moments were little breaks when a randomly struck conversation brought nuggets of new thought –talking literature with A who worked in microfinance with the Acumen Fund and discovering our common heritage; discussing whether Urdu should be written in Hindi script in order to preserve the language in India with T; clashing head-on with J over Cuban politics at lunch; understanding from A why someone would want to put a boutique hotel in Ahmedabad; learning from B how designers can source organic materials; always always bumping into T and talking football, Punjabi and why lawyers are perceived as emptying rather than filling; dancing with a stranger; drinking coffee with an artist; discussing with C how to put Shashi Tharoor on the spot with a question about Indian state accountability over genocide. The genius in TED lay in those moments where nobody knew what would come next, and could then be blown away by what did come next. At times, those were the speakers, and often, those moments came in the all too brief meetings we had with people who already seem to have become friends.

For me, TEDIndia was about a rediscovery of the power of storytelling –

These stories reminded me that the most powerful stories we can tell about ourselves are, in fact, stories about other people. These stories reminded me that by telling stories about ideas that are bigger than us, we become bigger than ourselves. These stories reminded me that we are shaped by the stories we tell others, but even more so by the stories we tell ourselves.

TED India group photo - the crazy version. Image by Kiruba Shankar

The TEDIndia talks will soon be up on the TED website, so do look out for them.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.